Shortly after its invention, photography was deployed as a disciplinary mechanism within developing state bureaucracies. Photographic archives identified and tracked those deemed to be social deviants, such as migrants, criminals and the insane. We’re familiar with the conventions of such images through mug shots and our own ID cards, which are all coded by a direct frontal gaze and plain background.
The camera’s operation within institutional surveillance indicates one of its functions—it manifests our desire for control. Once splayed upon paper, the subject becomes object, available for scrutiny and ownership. But there is a paradox: once captured thus, the original subject has a second life, and can speak to open hearts and minds.
An extreme form of this dual lineage is to be noted in the ID photographs found at S-21, a prison and secret interrogation centre of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, during the late 1970s. Silently explosive, S-21’s prisoner images—a selection of which are now on display in “Observance and Memorial: Photographs from S-21, Cambodia” at the Royal Ontario Museum’s Institute for Contemporary Culture—are caught in the dialectic between documentary control and expressive resistance.
When visiting the prison site (now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum) two photojournalists chanced upon some 6,000 deteriorating negatives. In exchange for their archival services, their collective Photo Archive Group now shares rights with TSGM for prints from 105 negatives. This collection of prints—selections of which have been on view at Tuol Sleng and various galleries and museums worldwide over the past 20 years, as well as published in book form—is now on display at the ICC.
Carla Rose Shapiro, one of two curators of the Toronto exhibition, is a genocide scholar who specializes in issues of representation, and she is deeply aware of the potential problems in the display of these images. At the ICC, the photographs are protected by a padding of explanatory materials in the form of text and visual panels, videos and a resource area. Respectful of the disturbing effect that the exhibition may have on visitors—which include members of the Cambodian diaspora—spaces for reflection offer Buddhist texts, chants and funerary sculpture.
Though the photographs are the affective heart of the exhibition, Shapiro’s supplementary materials explain the context of their production, outlining Khmer Rouge history in relation to its geo-politics, ideology and regime, and prison system.
As these materials explain, the Khmer Rouge was a political movement fighting for an independent Cambodia, a country historically threatened by surrounding regions. Besides a lengthy French colonial occupation that began in the 1800s, Cambodia in the 1900s prior to Khmer Rouge rule had tense relations with China, Vietnam and Thailand, and it suffered heavy US bombing during the Vietnam War. When the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, many Cambodians welcomed the promise of independence. Led by Pol Pot, it held power for four years.
Khmer Rouge ideology was concocted out of Maoism and Stalinism and further fused with French and Cambodian mythology. Its utopian goal was the radical transformation to an agrarian, self-sufficient Cambodia. But its ill-conceived strategies and inept administration was a massive failure: it is estimated that more than 1 million Cambodians died from starvation, overwork or illness.
S-21 was developed to gather information about the so-called traitors Pol Pot blamed for the nation’s disaster; he imagined they were infiltrating the party. As was discussed at an exhibition-related ICC symposium on November 10, a confession-generating “string” system was established by the Khmer Rouge to identify such “traitors.” Under torture, prisoners produced fabricated lists of other “traitors,” who were then arrested and tortured to create another list, creating a continuous flow of innocent prisoners.
Some 4,000 confessional texts were produced in this way at S-21. Once confessions were obtained, the prisoners were killed, mostly by being bludgeoned to death, and were thrown into mass graves. Entire families of prisoners were also arrested and killed. It is said that 14,000 Cambodians died at S-21; according to current numbers, says Photo Archive Group’s Michael Perkins (the other curator of the ICC show) only 23 people survived. Overall, it’s estimated that 2 million perished during the Khmer Rouge regime.
Images of some of S-21’s victims are enclosed within a muted, grey space constructed out of shard-like walls inside the ROM crystal. The original format of the images as they functioned within the S-21 system—small, paired front and profile shots, attached to documentation pages—are here transformed into a format more consistent with that of an art gallery: enlarged fine-art prints inside mattes and frames. To viewers today, the image style may recall the minimalist Avedon aesthetic and its incarnations in contemporary photographic portraiture, with subjects composed centrally within a square frame, isolated from a stark white background, and looking directly at the camera. Contrasting black shapes in the images—signs of the irreparably damaged negatives—contribute to the contemporary aesthetic, but also seem to speak to the damage, danger and horror that encroached upon these people at the time their prisoner ID photos were taken.
Shapiro and others connected to “Observance and Memorial: Photographs from S-21, Cambodia” have struggled to control the reception of these images. In conversation, Shapiro acknowledges the aesthetic power of these “skillfully created” photographs, which were produced with a medium-format camera and careful attention to lighting. But ultimately she insists that these images are not to be viewed as art. Rather, the exhibition literature declares, they should be considered as “documentary evidence.” Francisco Alvarez, managing director of the ICC, echoes this concern in the exhibition press release, stating, “This is not an art exhibition.” Such emphatic viewing strictures from Shapiro and Alvarez suggest an understanding of artworks solely as objects of aesthetic appreciation.
This curatorial anxiety over labelling reflects the slippery definitions of art within contemporary life generally, but also between documentary and art photography. It also follows from the troubled display history of the S-21 images. For example, in 1997, the Museum of Modern Art—most certainly an art venue—displayed 22 of these prints. Cognizant of the ensuing debate (Thierry de Duve’s essay in the Summer 2008 issue of October being one example) Shapiro has worked to avoid such confusion.
But it is not only the style of the images that prompts their reception as art, and this is surely what Photo Archive Group recognized in these “powerful” images. If we consider the boundaries of art as expanded beyond surface style and inclusive of profound reality, we might admit these images as art despite their very different production context.
The effect of this exhibition is beyond description, and one word for that is “sublime.” This speechless intensity is produced out of what we know about the photographs’ production and from our close attention to the faces and other details contained in them. The different expressions shown—of fear and defiance on the one hand, and of conventional smile-and-pose conditioning on the other—suggest that even here the codes of photographic portraiture endure, creating cumulative intensity. In the film The Conscience of Nhem En, one survivor described the moment she was photographed as, “All I thought was, I’m going to die.”
The sting of a photograph of a mother with a small child’s arm reaching up to her from below the frame is sharpened when we learn about a tree that still stands outside the museum today. Its signage reads, “Killing Tree Against Which Executioners Beat Children.” Nhem En, who became staff photographer at S-21 when he was 16, described part of his process in the film S-21: “We told them [prisoners] to look straight ahead… If the prisoners had children, they were arrested too. We took their photo for the record. Yeah, they knew they’d die.”
Despite the camera’s chilling role in violent control at S-21, something of the individuals killed there remains in its photographs. If we look carefully, with open hearts, we can see their suffering and their resistance—and from this, attempt to recuperate their humanity, as well as our own.
